Volume 11 Issue 12, December 2015

Bose–Einstein condensation in atomic gases was first observed in 1995. As we look back at the past 20 years of this thriving field, it's clear that there is much to celebrate.

An experiment with cold atoms confined in an isotropic three-dimensional harmonic potential confirms the long-predicted non-damping oscillations of the breathing mode.

Electric fields can controllably break the inversion symmetry of bilayer graphene, which can be harnessed to generate pure valley currents.

Anharmonicity is a property of lattice vibrations governing how they interact and how well they conduct heat. Experiments on tin selenide, the most efficient thermoelectric material known, now provide a link between anharmonicity and electronic orbitals.

Cells exploit chemical waves to map the space around them, but their dynamics is difficult to replicate. Using a set of genes to generate a travelling front of protein concentration outside a living cell constitutes a remarkable achievement.

Deep-sea sediments reveal the production sites of the heaviest chemical elements in the Universe to be neutron star mergers — rare events that eject large amounts of mass — and not core-collapse supernovae.

Two observational studies published in Nature Physics provided early evidence for the mechanisms of magnetic reconnection in three dimensions and in a turbulent medium.

Ultracold-atom experiments enable more flexibility in the study of quantum transport phenomena that are otherwise difficult to probe in solid-state systems. A survey of recent advances highlights the challenges and opportunities of this approach.

The mechanisms of decoherence in solid-state spin qubits subject to low magnetic fields turn out to be more complex than previously expected as an additional fast relaxation stage has now been identified.

A cold-atom experiment confirms Boltzmann’s special case predicted more than a century ago: the ‘breathe’ mode of a gas in a perfectly isotropic three-dimensional harmonic potential is never damped by elastic collisions.

Magnetic atoms embedded in a niobium selenide superconductor are shown to give rise to a long-range coherent bound state extending tens of nanometres.

Bound states in semiconductor–superconductor hybrids are shown to have parity lifetimes of over 10 milliseconds, suggesting that they could provide a platform for topological quantum computing.

Although electron motion is prohibited in magnetic insulators, the electron spin can be transported by magnons. Such magnons, generated and detected using all-electrical methods, are now shown to travel micrometre distances at room temperature.

Bilayer graphene can host topological currents that are robust against defects and are associated with the electron valleys. It is now shown that electric fields can tune this topological valley transport over long distances at room temperature.

Bilayer graphene can host topological currents that are robust against defects and are associated with the electron valleys. It is now shown that electric fields can tune this topological valley transport over long distances at room temperature.

When multicellular systems need to communicate over long distances, and signalling molecules are too slow to diffuse, travelling fronts of these molecules emerge—a phenomenon now reconstituted in a coupled array of artificial cells.

Stars could produce our heavy elements through a rapid neutron-capture process during a supernova or merger of binary stars, but which is it? A study of ²⁴⁴Pu reveals that a rare event with a high yield is more likely, favouring mergers.

Using a superconducting circuit analogue of an atom in front of a mirror it is possible to shape the modes of the quantum vacuum and hide the atom from the vacuum fluctuations.

A theoretical study uncovers the role of entanglement in the relaxation dynamics of a one-dimensional Bose gas following coherent splitting, a relevant scenario for recent ultracold atom experiments.

For small twist angles, electrons can resonantly tunnel between graphene layers in a van der Waals heterostructure. It is now shown that the tunnelling not only preserves energy and momentum, but also the chirality of electronic states.

Tin selenide is at present the best thermoelectric conversion material. Neutron scattering results and ab initio simulations show that the large phonon scattering is due to the development of a lattice instability driven by orbital interactions.

A combination of nonlinear optical experiments, piezoresponse force microscopy and Monte Carlo simulations resolves the correlation between polarization, topology and temperature for the hexagonal manganite YMnO₃—a persistent ferroelectrics puzzle.

Cells moving in a tissue undergo a rigidity transition resembling that of active particles jamming at a critical density—but the tissue density stays constant. A new type of rigidity transition implicates the physical properties of the cells.

Fermi resolved.